Australian Air Force Wants New Spy Drones

As if the new data retention proposals weren’t enough to get you breaking out your tin foil hat, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) has revealed that it wants to put seven massive surveillance UAV drones into active service by 2019.

A report by the ABC into Australia’s drone capability reveals that the RAAF in its latest Defence Capability Plan brought forward the plan to deploy drones into Australian airspace by three years after eight years of um-ing and ah-ing by previous governments and opposition parties.

The drone that the Air Force wants to put into service is the MQ4C Triton from Northrop Grumman — an aircraft that can fly at a maxiumum speed of over 600kph for a total time of 28 hours. Extrapolating those figures gives you a theoretical total distance covered per flight session of over 15,000 kilometres.

The cost of the nine drones? Between $2 billion and $3 billion. That’s about $200 million per drone.

The RAAF says these aircraft will be used in naval exercises. That is, finding asylum seeker boats and patrolling the borders for illegal fishing.

So Defence members benefits drop/scrapped, current service vehicles constantly broken and in urgent need of replacment, H Model capability gone, JSF budget blown. Yeah this is a great Idea (sarcasm). Will this deter the boats from coming over and or help process boat people? Why not buy something useful.

These drones will be hardly different in effect to the already in place Orions that are being retired. They are a bit more efficient at doing what they do because they lose the pilots, thats it. They won't be swarming over our heads anytime soon.